Portable Content

Google has launched an online document template in addition to the googleDocs application. Its basically an online microsoft words with the a document template where you can generate a document and save it. Maybe we can try this to speed up our documentation process.

A link for it: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/templates-bring-docs-to-life.html

Heard of seaside? It’s a web application frame work developed in smalltalk. A Seaside application can be thought of as a tree of stateful components as opposed to most other frameworks that are stateless such as cakephp and rails.

Randal L. Schwartz from Stonehenge (a leading pearl developer) believes that seaside will be the next rails. Schwartz would say that though as he is one of the most early adopters of small talk working on the first gui systems at xerox. That said its certainly an interesting premise for a web application framework. Another interesting part of seaside is the fact that the language it’s built in(small talk) has been around for 20 years. So, although this is not your daddy’s framework it sure is your daddy’s language.

More info? Check http://seaside.st

Meebo just announced its new Community Instant Messaging that will provide a messaging system to any site with a community.

It looks similar to the Facebook chat function you can pop out the chat session and keep it live on your desktop even after you leave the site. Even better, the business model is as follows: Meebo will offer this free and place ads. Revenues are split 50/50 with the partner.

Meebo is only working with a few partners, but over time they say they will open up the API for everyone and provide the service as a utility on demand.

Just got my itunes updated and found this interesting new category in the iTunes music store, which is called the iTunes U. It is a video/audio podcast channels dedicated for free university lectures and tutorials all over the world. I personally find it very exciting… And I wonder this where this whole revolution of free contents and social contents are going… any thoughts?

Here is an demo video from Apple:

Apple iTunes U demo

The rather poorly designed interface of Muzu.tv is wrapped around a good concept: niche music media. People upload music related content such as video clips from gigs, interviews and even channels for other music nerds. I’m sure if they don’t nail it then someone else will very soon.

A nicely toned typography cross-media piece by graphic designer Something Planned.

I love HBO. They make all of those edgy television dramas like The Wire and Deadwood that are shooting holes in the film industry when it comes to storytelling. I also love vampires. They’re always so well spoken and educated (dumb people get lotted with being zombies). Anyway, when you mixed the two together, you’re bound to get Gothic excitement from all corners of the globe.

True Blood is a new HBO series written by Alan Ball (creator of Six Feet Under) due to be released in the latter part of 2008. The creators and marketers have started a very well thought out viral campaign, engaging directly with what might be perceived as the pillars of the goth community including horror film bloggers and online Gothic enthusiasts.

The letters have been written in dead languages like Babylonian and Ugaritic and sent out to these key culture-deciders. In no time at all the recipients duly pitched in to translate them throughout the community. The group effort, carried out on blogs and message boards, led to a macabre Web site guarded by a beautiful vampire, where visitors could view short prequel episodes to HBO’s new series and learn about a product called Tru Blood that obviates the need for vampires to feast on humans.

This campaign has a four month lead time. You hear that: four months. If studios who have the money and the networks to run multinational advertising campaigns are investing in campaigns directly engaging with communities and allowing very long lead times, then it draws attention to the fact that marketing through niche communities has a place and it’s best to do it slowly to draw as much blood possible from your victims.

Radiohead have released a video for “House of Cards” off their In Rainbows album. It’s reliably trippy. The blog post at the Google developer site tells you that

No cameras or lights were used. Instead two technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.

Joi, the CEO of Creative Commons adds:

Exciting for Creative Commons is that the data (although not the music) used to produce this music video are being made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License on the Google Code site.

The Source code to the software used is being made available under a Apache License 2.0.

This combination of Open Source licenses for code and Creative Commons licenses for data/content is very “good idea”.

[Boing Boing]

I thought I might restrain myself from enthusing about the new iPhone Apps (Do I want an application that makes my iPhone sound off like a cow when I turn it upside down? Yes please! How have I lived without this!), and help spread the word that the Republican Party is letting us Internet folk help develop their policies. Quick! Sign up and convince the Republicans about your great policy ideas - ideally something involving bikinis and jelly-wrestling. (http://www.gopplatform2008.com/intro.aspx)

Google’s first free downloadable iPhone application. It does what google is good at, searching.

here’s the link